In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and then tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. Here are mental droppings from a newly retired radio engineer running from tech news to economics; from firearms to the world at large; from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of stuff.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

40 Years in the Desert

In modern America, I'll bet everyone, even the most ardent atheists, have heard the story of the Exodus and the 40 years the Israelis spent wandering the desert. Thanks to Charlton Heston's portrayal of Moses and Cecil B. DeMille's production of The Ten Commandments, it's not just young kids in parochial school who learn this. Even I knew the highlights of this story in my most atheistic days.

Something that is glossed over is a simple question: why 40 years wandering the desert?. And, no, it's not because Moses wouldn't stop to ask for directions, in the words of the "men are so stupid" joke.

40 years was so that the generation that knew only slavery in Egypt would die off. In their place would be a generation born during the Exodus, who were accustomed to depending on God every day, for their only food was manna from heaven that was provided every day, except the sabbath. It would be a generation that had never known slavery, only dependence on God, but was otherwise self-directing. It wasn't right to put a generation into the promised land that only knew how to be slaves. A generation that knew how to decide things for themselves, with prayerful requests, of course, would be much better custodians of the land.

Where am I going? Why this story? Although it was a couple of days ago, I just saw Brock's posting over at Free North Carolina, "We're in Trouble" It's a 5 minute video with an economics teacher from Valencia College in Florida talking about his students' definition of the American dream, which includes getting you and I to provide their medical care, give them a job, pay for their house downpayment, and a lot of other things that don't seem to appear anywhere in our founding documents.

You see, it so happens it's 40 years since the 1960s radicals, like Bill Ayers, and his crowd, took over education. It's long enough for the generation that taught any real values to have died off (or retired) - for the most part. It's long enough so that every kid coming out of the public schools in the USSA has been marinated in socialism for their entire education - provided largely by educators who have marinated in socialism their entire lives. A child starting school in 1970 would have graduated college in 1987 (on average); they've been soaked in socialism for over 40 years.

Is it any wonder this is what they produce? Is it coincidence? Yeah, I don't think so, either. We have a lot of teaching to do.

I think it started earlier, with LBJ's "Great Society". He was the one who first started pumping the ideas into the kids during school, so that by the late sixties and early seventies some of them were lost.

"Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." - Joseph Stalin

“Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.” - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

There's been a plan long set in action by the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Carnegie and Rockefeller. From a speech by Wilson, "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

The purpose of the plan was to limit the abilities of the masses, to make them complacent with their lot in life. The are made to sit at a desk for most of their school years which leads to sitting at another location doing monotonous actions daily until they die - and are happy to be there because this is what they were trained to do from the age of 5, along with a host of other ideals and expectations.

The industrial revolution had 2 major needs: they needed individuals to work in conjunction with the factories and buy the crap that was produced therein. I'd say that they were more successful than even they thought possible.

John Tayler Gatto points out & asks, "You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?

"If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?"

And thus I "home educate" though rarely are we home. As we live and move in the world, the world is open to my children.

I think it was Thomas Sowell who said you can prove that education is not a profession by observing that amateurs routinely do a better job at it than profession teachers. Home educated children routinely outperform their professionally educated peers on every measure.

You would not expect to find this in a true profession; certainly, a surgeon is more to be trusted than a neighbor when it comes to opening your abdomen, yet you or your neighbor are virtually always better educators than professionals.

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About Me

Retired radio engineer, follower of Christ, RF designer, mentor. Radio ham, home shop machinist, lapidary, silversmith, roadie cyclist, learning to be a rifleman, and home defender, - a guy with too many interests to keep track of.

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